Editorial | Campion or Glenmuir?

With swaggering and anxieties receding after the annual ranking of high schools based on results in Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) exams, the time is perhaps ripe for a conversation about a broader, and more inclusive, index of how much value added these institutions actually contribute to student outcomes.

This newspaper therefore suggests that the education ministry place on its agenda, for serious discussion by stakeholders, the Patterson Commission’s proposal for an expanded measure of high schools’ performance, taking into account, among other things, the education levels of the students they receive from the primary system.

The approach recommended by the Patterson Commission in its 2021 report on the transformation of the Jamaican education system is not revolutionary. Its principle is widely used in several countries, especially the United States and Britain, as well as long promoted by some Jamaican educational activists.

Indeed, elements of the Patterson report were employed by Dr Dennis Minott, the CEO of the college-preparation organisation, A-QuEST-FAIR, in a 2004 longitudinal analysis of the high-school performance in CXC’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE). Dr Minott’s rankings caused disquiet, disruption even, in the leadership of some of Jamaica’s so-called traditional high schools.

INEQUALITY

As the Patterson report noted, one area where the inequality in Jamaica’s society is reflected is in its education system, especially at the high-school level. There are the traditional high schools, largely attended by the children of the island’s better off, who are likely to have had the benefit of better preparation for secondary education at private preparatory schools. These secondary schools are, for the most part, the commission said, “high-performing institutions that can compete with the best schools anywhere in the world”.

Then there are the non-traditional high schools – the bulk of the institutions – which are mostly attended by poorer children who are likely to have attended poor-performing, government primary schools. Their parents tend to be without the capacity to provide strong educational support.

The demographic and economic chasm between the schools hardly ever factors in comparisons of their performance, including the annual ranking of high schools by an organisation called Educate Jamaica, whose results are based primarily on the percentage of grade-11 cohorts that pass at least five CSEC subjects, including maths and English.

By this measure the traditional high schools are consistently at the helm, with the two top spots generally alternating between two Roman Catholic-run institutions, the co-ed Campion College and the all-girls Immaculate Conception High School. These schools are allocated the top students in the Primary Education Profile exams, which tests the readiness of grade-six students for secondary education.

This year, Immaculate was Educate Jamaica’s top school: 98.8 per cent of its students passed five or more subjects by Grade 11. Campion’s percentage was 97.5. They were followed by the Methodist Church and the the United Church in Jamaica & the Cayman Islands-run St Andrew High School for Girls, with 93 per cent.

EVALUATION

The Patterson Commission did not address unofficial rankings like Educate Jamaica’s. It focused instead on the evaluation of school’s conducted by the Government’s National Education Inspectorate (NEI), whose baseline survey, published in 2015, found that 45 per cent of school leaders were “unsatisfactory” and that only 55 per cent of teachers were “satisfactory or above”.

The following year, however, the NEI – “inexplicably” according to the Patterson Commission– reported that 63 per cent were overall effective, while the satisfactory rating of the school leadership and management jumped from 59 to 76 per cent. The rating for student progress moved from 47 per cent to 62 per cent.

The proposal of the Patterson Commission is for the NEI’s assessment of schools to be supplemented with a ranking that uses a wider matrix which captures the additional value schools bring to their students, given where they started. There would also be separate rankings for traditional high and new secondary schools.

In essence, value added would measure student outcomes in CSEC and the various components of CAPE, taking into account the grades and other relevant factors with which students entered high school. There would also still be a normal count of exam passes.

The overall ranking of schools would be an average of the seven rankings in the matrix.

When the Patterson Commission applied this composite index to 42 traditional high schools, Glenmuir High School, in the parish of Clarendon, was at the top, although it was 16th in the percentage of CSEC passes. It, however, was number one for value added at CSEC. Immaculate was fourth overall, but 35th with respect to the measure of the value added. Campion was sixth overall but 41st with respect to value added.

We support the value of adding this system to the assessment of Jamaica’s high schools, rather than merely relying on the generally predictable outcomes at CSEC by institutions that enrol students with high grades and better environment to sustain their advantage.

As the Patterson Commission put it: “If a high school gets mainly students from disadvantaged homes and poor-performing primary schools but ends up with only 40 per cent of them passing their CSEC exams, it may well be a better performer than a school that gets very advantaged and well-prepared students that end up with a pass rate of 75 per cent in the CSEC and CAPE exams.”

It is a way, too, of identifying, and celebrating, those institutions that perform under difficult circumstances, yet no one pays attention.

Updated August 8, 2023, incorporating correction: Methodist Church and the the United Church in Jamaica & the Cayman Islands -St Andrew High School for Girls